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obama nafta

obama nafta: Page 1

Brian Knowlton of he New York Times offers "In Shift, Obama Doesn’t Plan to Reopen Nafta Talks" (link), which shouldn't come as much of a surprise to those who've been following the Obama NAFTA issue, especially when Obama admitted being deceptive about what he actually supports. From the article:
The Obama administration said on Monday that it had no plans to reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement to revise its labor and environmental provisions, as then-Senator Barack Obama promised to do during his presidential campaign.
"The president has said we will look at all...

From this:
The Obama administration will try to reinvent a program to allow Mexican trucks full access to U.S. highways.
An 18-month-old pilot program that allowed a few Mexican trucks beyond a border buffer zone died when President Barack Obama signed a sweeping $410 billion government spending bill on Wednesday. The bill barred spending on the pilot program.
A spokeswoman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Debbie Mesloh, said Obama has told the office to work with Congress, the Transportation and State departments and Mexican officials to come up with legislation to create "a...

Mexico's president Felipe Calderon met with Barack Obama for an hour and a half earlier today in Washington DC. After the meeting, Calderon said:
"I've proposed to President Obama that we make a strategic alliance of our two governments to confront the common problems and resolve them together, among them security."
And, it looks like Obama is open to that idea; see the statement from change dot gov cached here:
[Obama] expressed his continued commitment to upgrading NAFTA to strengthen labor and environmental provisions to reflect the values that are widely shared in both of our countries,...

Barack Obama is apparently considering naming former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk as U.S. Trade Representative. Kirk is a strong NAFTA booster while Obama has only pretended not to be one. During the campaign, Obama played a cute game: pretending to want to "renegotiate" NAFTA, only to later admit that he'd been misleading. With Kirk, at least what they want to do is a bit more out in the open.
Around March 12, 2001, Dino Chiecci of the Associated Press included this in "Meeting of Minds/Governors agree on Dallas trade center" (PDF link):
Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk said “75 percent of goods that move...

Live coverage of the "debate" at Hofstra University between John McCain and Barack Obama commences now.
McCain is taking BHO to task for the "Sarah Palin is a ****" t-shirts and for BHO's implication of widespread rabble-rousing at McCain/Palin rallies.
And, BHO is stumbling. He indeed has a "glass jaw", yet no one wants to take advantage of his lack of experience at being challenged.

From this:
In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.
"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake"...
Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered...
In other words, he was...

The fourth annual "North American Leaders Summit" - part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership started by George Bush - will be held Monday and Tuesday in New Orleans and will be attended by Bush, Felipe Calderon of Mexico, and Stephen Harper of Canada. Expect the news reports about the event to be credulous. Speaking of which, Norma Greenaway of the Canwest News Service/Ottawa Citizen offers this:
The annual leaders' gathering, popularly referred to as the Amigos Summit, is being held against the backdrop of a gripping race for the U.S. presidency where the North American Free Trade...

As previously discussed, Barack Obama senior economic policy advisor Austan Goolsbee discussed the candidate's position on NAFTA with Canadian government officials, supposedly letting them know that his anti-NAFTA statements were simply political posturing. Now, a Canadian government memo on the meeting has been released, despite previous denials of such a meeting having taken place. A roundup of the various Clintonian-style denials is here and here.
For instance, on February 29, Goolsbee said "It is a totally inaccurate story... I did not call these people and I direct you to the press...

Yet another laundry list of promises is available in the article "I will repair our relationship with Mexico" (link), supposedly written by Barack Obama himself. It contains two phrases with "prosperity" and "security" together in relation to North America and even the use of "partnership" at the end.